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FROM THE VAULT: The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade: Everything You Didn't Know

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Published Nov 28, 2024, 2:00 PM

The TMI twosome show their gratitude to listeners with a heaping helping of true-life turkey day absurdity. Listen as Jordan forces Heigl to channel his inner looner (google it) and discuss the bizarre origin of this holiday tradition — which somehow involves the Titanic, burning the fingers of children, and elephant droppings. You'll hear all about the mayhem caused during early editions of the parade, when the gargantuan character balloons were released into the sky to collide with planes, buildings and high-tension wires. You'll also find out if you have what it takes to be a "balloon pilot" (spoiler: you probably don't) and learn all about the hilariously petty feud between rival TV networks battling over broadcasting rights. Along the way, the TMI team offer their trademark tangents on the Rockettes, mid-century minimalist composers, pumpkin pie, the JFK assassination, 'Miracle on 34th Street,' living statue performers, and the new and exciting things that can be done to your body after you die. 

Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows, and more. We are your inflatable cartoon characters of Info. Nope, your festive float riders of facts, Nope, your department store divas of details. Giving thanks for each and every one of you tuned in today. Nope. My name is Jordan run Tug. No, come on, those are all good? Now? Those were all solid?

Nope, every single one a miss? How would you have done that?

Not at all? I'm Alex Igel.

Why do you care about the Mazy's Thanksgiving Parade?

Jordan? Well, I'll tell you well. I had a whole intro written that I was going to tease that, but I guess I'll go right into it now. You know why. In the recent episode, I think it was the candy episode, we talked about how the super Bowl was one of the last vestiges of monoculture that we yes, and I think I would also include the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on that short list. Unlike the super Bowl or even the Olympics, it's an event that's purely based on frivolous fun. And I see the Thanksgiving Day Parade as a descendant of variety show vaudeville, which is largely extinct in twenty first century mass media. Okay, you don't have plate spinners, you don't have acrobats, you don't have novelty acts like that's gone. That's gone. This is the closest thing we have that's part of our culture, is it.

Yeah, you're connecting Vaudeville to all the Ed Sullivan like goofy stuff to the Macy's Day Parade.

Yeah, I said, it's a descendants. I mean, there's nothing else out there like this. You know, we got the Dick Clark Rock in New Year's Eve that's basically a lame halftime show. It's been updated and new oblivion. It's nothing. You got the Fourth of July Fireworks, which are also hosted by Macy's. That just doesn't have the same It's good, it lacks the goofiness factory. You know, you got the Boston Pops it's too stuffy. You know. The Oscars they swing wildly between taking themselves too seriously and then also revealing troubling truths about our society. The maces, Thanks Saving, they parade. It just it makes no bones about what it is. It's pure stupid, giddy, corny celebration, and I think we need that. I strongly believe in that. And you know, I'm not gonna lie. I've fallen off from watching it regularly, but I still get happy when I'm walking between rooms with casserole dishes or tablecloths on Thanksgiving morning and I see that it's still on.

I guess, I just I don't disagree with what you're saying about those other aspects of monoculture, but I guess I just like, is this really such a thing. I would have thought, like football was morph being on Thanksgiving?

Or really macus thanks Ev they parade. I mean, I guess you know, I'll leave it to listeners to tweet at us.

No, No, I mean I remember my mom liking it a good bit mine too.

Yeah.

I never once went for it when I was in New York, did you?

Oh? No, god, no, Well it was either I was always home first of all, right, But even if I wasn't, I would like to see the inflating of the balloons the night before, or that'd be kind of cool. That seems a little less chaotic. But yeah, no, I mean for the same reason I would never do the ball on Times Square. Sure the people in the cold, No, yeah, well, yeah, what do you think about this? I guess you don't think about that. I don't think about it. It's Whitney Houston on Mariah Carrey. I don't think about you at all. Yeah, yeah, looked.

Yeah, it does seem unbearably quaint in the sense of, like, you know, let's get a bunch of large things and put them down a street.

Yeah, it's hilarious that we still have that. Yes, it's hilarious. They spent you know, it's for me. It's the same reason that I love big, stupid musicals, because I find the inherent joke of it all. Wow, somebody took a lot of time and effort and money and got a whole bunch of other people and convinced them that this was a good idea, put all these resources into it for something that's really kind of goofy. And I admire that hutzpah. I find that idalism. I find it to be both the best and the worst of being American. And I think that that sums up thanksgiving perfectly. A day of giving thanks and gratitude, but also a day of absolute gluttony and waste. I think it's the same I guess of America.

I guess I just don't see the artistry in it in like the same sense as like, oh, my friend, no, I kind of.

Got seventeenth pages.

I'm no, I'm well. But to me, artistry is different from craftsman show. Yeah, yeah, you're just The Macy's Day Parade is an example of like, yeah, organization and craftsmanship, but it's not like it's not a musical.

I'm sorry.

There's at least some like emotional content to a musical. I just I don't get the get You watch a big spider man float down the street and you're you're what transcended? Like, what does that tell us about the human experience? I think it's the same as a firework. How do you feel about watching a firework?

Yeah? No, fireworks whip? Well okay, but yes, I know they whip, but yeah, it's the same experience of everybody in one place looking up and going wow.

Maybe I guess I connect fireworks to something more primal, which is just like the fire Yeah, the love of blowing of things exploding. I don't like, well we got some exploding. Yeah no, but that's like the first love of man other than violence and sex. It's probably an alcohol. It's probably it's gotta be top five, right.

Well okay, well what about looking to the sky waiting for a giant being to come down and grace you.

Your reaching is what you're doing, and I respect it because that's what you do. But no, I don't get it. And I feel like if it went away, I would go huh and then never think about it ever again in my life once ever. And I didn't realize this was such a thing for you, Like you turned this around in like three days after being like, well I'm getting into the Macy state. Red Just it kind of came out of nowhere for me.

I mean, don't ever underestimate my ability to just get interested in anything and then spin it into something that's true. That's true.

Okay, man, all right, I'm willing to go along with it. I'm here for it. It's giving.

Yeah, I don't think you've read through this at all, So I think this is bringing a lot of live react.

It's giving thanks, it's giving balloons. Do you like balloons?

Not any more than the average in the average bear.

So you're not like a like, I'm not a lunar.

No.

So but if somebody like, if somebody like brought you say.

No, I wouldn't. I'd say, well, now I got to deal with this until yeah, till it. Yeah, it's like a pad I didn't ask for. Well, I have to, I have to take kind of I feel about flowers too. It's like, well, I gotta take care of this is going to die until it dies. Yeah.

Yeah, you brought me something a corpse to dispose of.

Well, here's a question I never would have thought. I would have asked you on the show, what do you think about balloon's Heigel?

You know, I can take them or leave them. I find it funny that it's an art form that is persisted. I mean, I get, you know, there for kids, and you can inhale the helium and it'll make your voice sound funny.

Although I don't.

I did have a terrifying I remember one time my high school chemistry teacher was like talking about how helium like paralyzes your vocal chords.

Oh yeah, I'm not good to do that as.

It yeah, and then like as an aside, and she was like, she was like, also, my husband is dying, and that's what's happened to him. It's just like a very very bizarre moment of being like sixteen and having an adult just like drop like she was a bit of a kook god lover. She's a water witch in rural Pennsylvania when she was growing up.

What is a water witch? Dowsing? You know? Dowsing? I mean, you know that's sick. I would, but I don't.

Yeah, that's like an old folk magic thing where you walk around with a stick and.

Well the stick Oh yeah, I didn't know that was what that was called.

Yeah, yeah, And she was like thought to have had that power in Pennsylki.

Wherever. What are you looking for with the stick water?

I mean it would be in like Appalachia and ok Appalachia sorry, an Appalachia and such. That would be where you would sink your well where the water witch told you.

That's the hell of a racket. Yeah.

Maybe that's why I don't like balloons, just because she traumatize.

Me in that good way. Uh yeah, I don't know.

I don't give you bubballoons, you know what I like pumpkin pie? Yeah, why didn't you give me seventeen pages on pumpkin pie?

I see it must more of a pecana guy, though, I'll allow it.

I'm not offended by that. At least you didn't say apple.

I'm glad you said that. I don't like apple pie and that's everyone's favorite. Not like it.

I just find it so basic.

Well yeah, well that yeah.

Do you just want to just shoot the for this whole episode about Thanksgiving?

We can we can work that. We could definitely work at a secon can do a type five on pies. Well, cranberries, I like what about that? I like cranberry sauce the older I get. Do you like it out of a can? That's what I'm saying.

I like that weird gelatinous stuff where it shakes out of the can in one form and you can still see the indentations of the ridges. YEA love that. That's America to me, and that's beautiful. All right, take it away.

Well from we will have fun. I promise I sense how anxious you are right now. We will have fun. It will be okay. I never said we wouldn't. I just no, continue going at the end of this episode. Okay, folks, I'm calling out at the end of this episode. I want to check in with you. This is going to be so much more entertaining than you ever thought, because here's the fundamental difference between you and I about how we approach this series. I don't mind covering things that I don't care about as long as the stories are interesting, Whereas you, if you don't care about the topic, that's it for you, and that's interesting to me. Okay. That's why I was able to turn around seventeen pages on the Macy's Thanksgiving they parayed in like two days. I've never really thought much about it before this, and then the more I dug into it, the more I found interesting stuff. And that's beautiful, and now we get to share that with people. That is what I am thankful for Thanksgiving. That is America, and that is what I am thankful for this Thanksgiving well, folks. From Macy's connection to my beloved Titanic, to the time stray balloons nearly crashed an airplane, to the sweat field bootcamp like life of a Rocket to the hilarious pettiness between rival TV networks for broadcasting rights, here is everything you didn't know about Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Now, before we talk about Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, Heigel, do you know the Ragamuffin Man? Is it like a the rag and bone Man? No, no, no, it's not. This is a truly bizarre, eccentric predecessor or precursor to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade called Ragamuffin Day. For many years at the turn of the century, there was a Thanksgiving Ragamuffin Parade, which was an event where local children dressed up as beggars and asked the adults on the street for pennies, candy, and apples. As we'll get to, not terribly dissimilar to Halloween trick or treating, this very whimsical tradition has a somewhat depressing origin, as so many whimsical traditions do. In the early nineteenth century, poor Massachusetts residents started knocking on doors on the eve of Thanksgiving begging something for Thanksgiving, and as a terrible, tasteless joke, well to do children in the neighborhood began dressing and tattered close and doing the same thing, mocking these poor starving people, and then go mass yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So after Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving an official holiday in eighteen sixty three, towns across the country held elaborate masquerade balls and parades, and children mostly dressed as these ragamuffins. It became a thing, and soon that became the dominant tradition on Thanksgiving morning in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, they just ran around the streets in rags. They darkened their faces with soot. They modeled themselves after Charlie Chaplin in the Tramp basically, and they'd ring doorbells and always say anything for Thanksgiving. By the nineteen hundreds, it was known as ragamuffin Day, and it wasn't exactly popular with the city officials. The New York Times complained in nineteen oh three, the practice of ringing all the doorbells and demanding backsheesh is long past a joke, and a nineteen oh nine Sons of Daniel boone hambook moaned this must be a foreign innovation, for no self respecting American boy would think of parading the streets dressed up like a ragamuffin and begging a cent from each passer by. And this is truly wild, especially mean spirited New Yorkers began heating up coins on their stoves and throwing these so called red pennies out onto the streets and roared with laughter as these kids burn their fingers to try to take them.

This is really the most like American.

Possible.

Starts with mocking the poor, yeah, ends with becoming a weird or I mean the middle ground. Is it becoming a weird nativist dig where there's like a hint of anti immigrant, a sousson of anti immigrant sentiment in there by the Daniel Boone society.

Question mark yeah, which I haven't looked up. I like the John Birch Society. I would only assume yeah, and then yeah. Then burning the fingers of children yeah, well yeah. By the nineteen thirties, articles appeared in the New York Times calling for an end to the ragamuffin day tradition, mostly because everyone found it annoying. There's a piece from nineteen thirty six, Ragamuffins frowned the Ponds the headline. Despite the endeavors of social agencies to discourage begging by children, it is likely that the customary Thanksgiving ragamuffins wearing discarded to pairrel of their elders with masks and painted faces. We'll ask passers by anything for Thanksgiving. The New York school superintendent sent a memo to his principles which stated, quote, modernity is incompatible with the custom of children to masquerade and annoy adults on Thanksgiving Day. Many citizens complain on Thanksgiving Day that they are annoyed by children dressed as ragamuffins who begged for money and gifts. Organizations like the Madison Square Boys Club began throwing parades to quote discourage the Thanksgiving ragamuffins, and they sported the slogan American Boys do not beg.

The sons of Daniel Boone were merged into the Boy Scouts. They be like an early competitors that merged in, but they used to dress in like the classic fringed buckskin situation, which is so much bit not just but yeah, that is so cool, so much cooler than a Boy Scout uniform.

Wow. So these parades began to kind of outstripped the whole ragamuffin day tradition for popularity. And also the Great Depression went a long way towards killing the ragamuffin Day tradition because at this point, the answer to the question anything for Thanksgiving was usually no. The Ragamuffin Day parades were largely a thing of the past by the fifties, having been out shown by the bigger, balloon centric parades like Macy's, which had received a boost in popularity thanks to its inclusion in the nineteen forty seven film Miracle on thirty Fourth Street, which we'll talk about later. This was also a period when Halloween was starting to become a bigger deal, so the whole costumes door to door begging tradition was absorbed into that. The loss of Ragamuffin Day hit some nostalgic New yorker's hard. As one patrolman told The New York Times, I remember how my fingers got blistered. But they don't have any real fun like that anymore. Tone, what are your thoughts on Ragamuffin Day. I think we should bring it back.

I mean, not necessarily the burning coin situation, but you know, I'll walk around and bring people's doors for money. I need it just as much as anyone everyone does. Or corn bread or pumpkin pie or whatever you got. Yeah, anything for Thanksgiving, you know, that's cool. It's like the purge.

No, that's after Thanksgiving. Oh okay, okay, okay, okay. So Ragamuffin Day gave way to parades on Thanksgiving and giving its status, you would imagine that Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade was the first of its kind in the United States, but this was not the case. The oldest Thanksgiving Day parade was actually founded in Philadelphia by appropriately enough, Macy's rivals, Gimbals. Gimbles had a store in New York next to Macy's flagship store in Harold Square, as you may remember from the movie Miracle on thirty fourth Street, and prior to Gimble's closure in nineteen eighty seven, their rivalry with Macy's was the stuff of legend. Even gave way to a popular phrase to brush off questions you didn't feel like answering. Does Macy's tell Gimbals your grandparents or anybody ever? Say that? No? Yeah, no mind either. Yeah. Gimbal's massive flagship store at Harold Square was home to the Manhattan Mall, which some New Yorkers may be familiar with. Until twenty twenty one. He was hit hard by the pandemic, and now it's just off of space. They paved down Gimbals and put us off his space, but back to their glory days. The Gimbals Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia kicked off in nineteen twenty, a full four years before Macy's unleashed their own holiday parade and the Gimbals thanks Giving Day Parade. It's still going on, though it's gone through a handful of name changes since Gimbles closed. Today it's called the six ABC Duncan Thanksgiving Day Parade really just just rolls off the tongue.

Well, at least they've got the Massachusetts connection in there with Duncan. That's got a warm macacus of the original you know, well to do Massachusetts family who founded the parade by mocking their poorer peers.

And actually Macy's has its origins in Massachusetts.

Ah, the state that just won't stop giving such a big heart. So oh, you were segueing that, and I was, I was trying to help you. Yeah, and I rejected your gift. I rejected your They could not hear his message.

They rejected him. Uh yeah.

Macy's founded by Rowland Hussey Macy, a native of Nantucket, perhaps the original man from Nantucket of poetry and song. According to legend. The store's red star logo was chosen because it resembled a tattoo Macy had received from his brief period working as a New England whaler.

Come on tattoos and whaling of trying to I'm mountain.

That's cool. No, that's yeah, that's cool man. And I wonder how many scholy square dick bags got that same tattoo in honor of him on their way to punch someone out of the drop Kick Murphy's show. Taking a lot of shots at Boston tonight. Feels good, yo. Despite this extremely metal backstory, Macy was kind of a failure for a time. Between eighteen forty three and eighteen fifty five, he opened four dry goods stores, including the original Macy store in downtown Haverhill, Massachusetts, in an effort to serve the mill employees of the area. After they all shuddered, he decided to try his luck in New York. His original store was on sixth and fourteenth. He was on sixth and fourteenth. There was an American Guitar center. But yeah, there was a guitar center. There's a I think I stole a lot from the Urban outfitters that was there.

On the corner. Yeah, yeah, it's not there anymore. Now. You know what's in that Urban Outfitters? Now, what's that? A Titanic exhibit, which I keep trying to set you up because there is a connection between Macy's and Titanic.

Anyway, then moved to Harold Squared, which is the classic Macy's location as most New Yorkers and.

Tourists know it.

Following his death, however, the company passed through a series of family members before being acquired by Isidor Strauss and his brother Nathan, who had previously had a license to sell china and other goods in the Macy's store. Isidor and his wife Ida are interesting because they famously died on the Titanic.

If you gotta die, you might as well do it famously.

Due to the orders of women and children, first, Isidor was not allowed in a lifeboat. A friend wanted to ask an officer about letting him board the boat, but he refused to go while there were still women and children on board. I had to refuse to leave her husband. When he tried to persuade him to go, she replied, we have been together for many years. Where you go I go, and that is supposedly the couple referenced in that shot of the old people cuddling together on the bed as the icy waters take them in James Cameron's Titanic.

I think the whole scene's actually enacted in the movie too. I forget. It's been a while, has it. It's been since February.

Not historically accurate, but sad. In reality, they were last seen sitting in deck chairs, and his body was later recovered floating in the ocean. He is buried at New York's Woodlawn Cemetery, along with an urn filled with water from the Rex site. In tribute to Ida. The Strauss Mausoleum bears the following Biblical verse from Song of Solomon eight to seven. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

There you go. The Bible was wrong.

If I'd say the waters succeeded water one Strauss's zero feels like kind of a you to put that on the on the gravestone, like.

The water too. The fact that they actually had an urn is not not a move.

I would have made. If I was a ghost slide there, I'd be like, you put one on.

Top of me. Yeah, not wrong, man, they really, I mean not to. I probably will cut this whole thing because it's the holidays. But there really have been some incredible advancements. And what to do with you after you die? Like, did you know they can put you on a firework? Yeah? Firework?

There was a company doing it, pressing you people into vinyl?

Vinyl? Yeah, would you press yourself? Like what would you have? Would you want to do the tree things? No? I want to do the tree thing? Oh?

What would I be pressed into? Yeah? Harsh noise? Yeah, like maybe something maybe an istres ending, noibounten.

Or or Lulu? Would you do Lou read in Metallica?

No, no, it can't be have lyrics. It's got to be instrumental and it has to make people feel. Maybe metal music actually has to make people feel like I feel all the time, which is on edge and back. And then they'll go, oh I remember him. No, I was actually just no. Have you heard about have you heard about the Infinity Chapel?

Or like the so I told you we take this to a place that made you happy? Yeah?

Eventually, no, what is the yes? John Cage, who famously wrote not wrote so much as conceptualized minimalism in a big way with four three three, which is a composition in quotes that is four minutes and thirty three seconds of nothing. He has a piece called as Slow as Possible.

And what it is is.

A properly maintained pipe organ can sustain forever. What yeah, if it just has air flowing through it and the keys are held down, you know, as long as the airflow never stopped. So I guess it's a composition. The piano version lasts anywhere from twenty to seventy minutes, but there is a foundation that is dedicated to putting on a performance in Germany that will end in twenty six forty. How would you keep the airflow going? I don't well, I mean, I don't think human civilization is going to last that long. But sandbags are held on the organ's pedals. The performance started on September fifth, two thousand and one, and it has oh good, yeah, it has rests involved. The note last changed on February fifth, twenty twenty two. And so what I want instead of like an eternal flame, is I want like a like a delay pedal set up with a guitar feeding back, so you just get a self oscillated echo to pitched guitar feedback forever.

That's oddly beautiful, I know, and some lovely. You're being sarcastic, but I actually find that deeply touching because I was just watching a thing on JFCA Assassination for the sixtieth anniversary. I say, as if I don't do that every year or two anyway, and was watching Jackie like the Eternal Flame. That's a very I yeah, that's very touching. I like that a lot, The Eternal The Eternal just like hit the guitar.

Yeah, so he just wanders by every now and again and just flicks a string and the amp is loud enough and the delays maxed out, so it just starts feeding back over and over again.

I wonder if you could make a feedback forever if you just hit it once.

So not forir Well, you could use an ebo, which was part of part of it, but the batteries on those do need to be changed. So in theory you could do it if you had it all kind of rigged up to solar panels and it just sort of, you know, in a battery to help it go overnight. Trust me, I've thought about this. It's like the eternal flame though, I mean, you have to have that hook up to some kind of like pain, you know, propane. Do you think it's propane? You should know this.

I think it is. I know that it like accidentally went out like some I feel like a tourist like accidentally doused it once or something. It was like quietly, wait how many times? On two occasions. Oh, inclement weather caused the flame to go out for a second time in March nineteen sixty seven. First, but first there was the holy water incident. This is per mental floss. On December tenth, nineteen sixty three, a group of Catholic school children were visiting the Kennedy Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The grave site was temporary, a place for the public to go grieve while the permanent memorial was being constructed. Even so, the eternal flame was already in place, lit by Jackie Kennedy on the day of the funeral. The children managed to extinguish the flame less than a month later while blessing it with holy water. Luckily, one of the grave guards happened to be a smoker, and he used his hip a lighter to reignite the memorial.

This crusty old guy bending down flickless. All right, col all right, I didn't see a thing. Wo wow, alright where worry well? From death to consumerism the American experience.

Yeah.

Flagship Herald Square location of Macy's initially consisted of just one building, but expanded through new construction eventually came to occupy a whole city block, save for a small, pre existing five story building on the corner of thirty fourth and Broadway that was purchased by a rival of Macy's and never to thwart their attempt at building the largest store in the world.

This rival had the largest store at.

The time, so undeterred, Macy's simply built around the building, which earned the name Million Dollar Corner when it was sold for a then record one million dollars in December nineteen eleven. Jordan, what is it now?

What it's worth? What's in there? Now? Oh?

Now?

Now it's a sunglasses hut?

Yeah that God love this country. Macy's does not own it still, but they have leased the air rights and put a sign shaped like a giant shopping bag on the roof. Macy's became the world's largest store when it opened in nineteen oh two, and it's a title it held into two thousand and nine, when Guinness World Records certified that the Accolade now belonged to the Shingsehi Centum City department store in Busan, South Korea. At five point eight four seven million square feet, Shinseia is practically three times the size of Macy's, but it remains the largest in North America, with its selling space adding up to over twenty six acres or over one point one million square feet. That was something I wanted to pitch to I pitched to people at one point that they wouldn't they wouldn't let me do, was see how long I could live in Macy's.

Oh that's so, because it's like, yeah, I pitched a lot of stuff.

I don't I think they like that presaged the kind of Logan Paul era of posting that they should have let me try.

That was literally my pitch.

I was like, I'll just go into Macy's and see how long I can stay in there uninterrupted, like I was gonna hot. I was gonna scope out and see what the security was for their closing routine. There's no way they can lock down all twenty six acres. I'm sure people have tried, but I would succeed.

I'm sure people have succeeded. Yeah, that's also true. It's probably motion sensors. Uh yeah, what were some other experiential things, because you did a few that were like you did the past life regressions.

But I did the past life regressions post and boy, I lied to that woman. I felt nothing. I made it all up. I could remember her name, I'd call her out right now. Uh, it's a crackish You're just rotten the ground. There's no past lives in your body or your mind. Then sorry, what was I saying?

Oh?

Yeah, So the land the building stands on has an estimated value of between three and four billion dollars. Macy's also boasts the world's largest shoe floor, with over sixty three thousand thousand square feet containing two hundred and eighty thousand pairs of shoes.

Quentin to hero must.

Love it there bah And speaking of shoes, Macy's was among the first American retail stores with escalators. A number of these century old wooden ones are still preserved in the store today. You say, forty two forty two. Yeah, and speaking of firsts, well, and speaking of constructions, and speaking of firsts, Macy's was the first to introduce colored bath towels to America in nineteen thirty two. Before that, they had been kept separate. Before that, America had only ever seen or imagined white bath towels. They also supposedly brought tea bags and the baked potato to the United States, and also when prohibition ended, the first liquor license issued by the City of New York was rh Macy and Co. This brings us now to the origin of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. Though the first was held on Thanksgiving Day, November twenty seventh, nineteen twenty four, it was actually called the Big Christmas Parade You disingenuous.

Just before the parade.

This was because the parade was designed to usher in the start of the Christmas shopping season by showcasing Macy's beautiful storefront and dazzling window displays. Those framed as welcoming Santa to New York, which is an interesting bit and why Santa always appears at the end of the parade. It wasn't until three years later, in nineteen twenty seven that was re christened the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and according to the New York Times, the majority of participants of this first parade were employees of the stores. This is a tradition or condition that continues to this day. In order to be involved with the parade, you must either be affiliated with Macy's or be recommended by someone who is, like joining the Freemasons.

Do you know Mason? No? I bet you doing? You still know it? Are you a Freemason? You think I would be, but I'm not. Had you pegged for a Shriner? I do like the hat? Yeah, I'm the little cars. Yeah.

Original parade, which began on one hundred and forty fifth Street before ending at Macy's thirty fourth a one hundred and eleven block six mile journey, and the floats at this point were being pulled by horses rather than cars. The route has since been shortened two and a half miles. It now begins at seventy seventh in Central Park West, but it still ends in front of Macy's. Approximately ten thousand people watched Santa, who rode on a float designed to look like a sled being pulled by a reindeer to be crowned King of the Kiddies. Glad that one went back to the drawing board, and then enjoyed the unveiling of the Sour's Christmas windows. The display was titled The Fairy Frolics.

Of wonder Town.

I think I've been to that bar and it featured marionettes of Mother Goose characters.

That sucks.

Yeah, you don't really easily impressed back then, Huh.

I see, And that's what I find so charming about all this.

Yes, is that?

Yeah? So it's a three hand made yeah, three analog huh. Yeah.

Now you just go on TikTok and watch people die. This is one hundred years later. We've made that progress. Greatest country on Earth. This is partially why most of the floats at this first year were nursery rhyme themed, depicting the little old Lady who lived in Shoe, little Miss Muffett, Red Riding Hood, and the rest. The procession included with the New York Times called a Retinue of clowns, freaks, animals and floats. You'll notice they said animals rather than balloons. For the first three years of the Macy's Thanksgaving, they parade animals with a big attraction of the day. The Central Park Zoo loaned out donkeys, lions, tigers, elephants, camels and bears, who were then draped in Macy's promotional pennants and marched down the six mile trail of tears down the majority of Manhattan. However, these animals.

Reportedly terrified children, and there are also reports of marching bands having the dodge massive piles of elephant dung during their trek. So in nineteen two twenty seven, it was decided to replace the zoo animals with less threatening and less messy balloon creatures. Although I've also read that these big balloon creatures were easier for the crowds to see, especially the short little children, so your mileage may vary. It's been weirdly hard to nail down the first balloons in the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but according to my research, they included a dragon, a toy soldier, and other animal shapes. The first cartoon character appeared in nineteen thirty two in the form of a popular cartoon character, Felix the Cat, and despite the fact that he's fallen on a fashion in favor of Disney characters these days. That balloon has returned to the parade several times over the years for old time's sake. Mickey Mouse joined the parade in nineteen thirty four with a balloon that was designed by Uncle Walt himself, and that same year, nineteen thirty four, the parade featured a balloon of the popular entertainer Eddie Canter, who became I believe the first real life person to be a Mora lies Via Mas parade balloon, and I think to date the only other real life person I could find who was turned into a balloon was Harpo Marx in nineteen thirty three. The balloons had sound effects, which meant that the flying twenty five foot docs and barked, the massive flying pig oinked, and the colicky kid balloon really cried, which is horrifying. Yeah, I don't like that.

Yeah.

No. Some of these old timey balloons, if you look them up, are really freaky because it's they're genuinely scary. There's things like a lot of two headed stuff, two headed pirate. There's the Nantucket Sea serpent, presumably a nod to the macy's founder's origin on Nantucket Pinocchio with supposedly a forty four foot nose. I don't know how the era dynamics of that would work. And then there was also Bobo the Hobo. Yeah, you're gonna have some of those in these early years.

Yeah, I mean, and the whole thing stems from the rich mocking the poor, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'd like to read this description from an undetermined year of the parade. I think it's nineteen thirty two that appeared in the New York Times, which details quote a human behemoth twenty one feet tall that had the crawl under the elevated structure at sixty sixth them Broadway. A dinosaur sixty feet long, attended by a bodyguard, a prehistoric cave man, and a twenty five foot docks in that swayed along in the company of gigantic turkeys and chickens and ducks of heroic size.

That's a good, bad, great band name. Yeah, how big does a duck have to be a qualifies heroic? Labrador? Clydestone.

I was gonna say Beethoven, Well it was a Beethoven. San Bernard. I want to say San Bernard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, I think horse size. Though, isn't that a reddit thing that they ask celebrities every time they do ames? Would you rather fight one one horse sized duck or one hundred, five hundred whatever duck sized horses or something like that?

Yeah, okay, it's finding one hundred duck sized horses or a horse sized duck. Yeah, okay, what about you? Probably a horse sized duck because then you know where you stand?

No, definitely, you know you know how many duck sized horses I could just kick into oblivion?

A hundred of them? Though? Yeah, you did take karate and I've been jogging, so come on, they wouldn't I'd like to ask a rock at this question. That's something they get all the profiles on the rockets I read Wall Street Journal. Really drop a ball on that one.

As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

Well, back to the ballurns now. This first year of the parade, the balloons were filled with air and held aloft by a support crew with sticks. They were called upside down marionettes back then, but kind of semi jokingly. But these days it's easier to think of a more as muppets kind of. It wasn't until two years after the balloons debuted in nineteen twenty nine that they began to fill them with a mixture of air and helium so that they floated. This kicked off a tradition that has made Macy's the second largest consumer of helium in this country, next to the US government. Uh. Yeah, I I don't know if we're doing weather balloon in quotes experiments or what, but yeah, the US government is the largest consumer of helium in this country, more than Party Central or Ie Party or whatever.

The medical field uses helium, and diagnostic equipment such as MRIs helium neon lasers are used in eye surgery. National defense applications include rocket engine testing, scientific balloons, surveillance craft, air to air missile guidance systems, and more.

And I shudder to think what the end more is.

NASA uses helium to keep hot gases and ultra cold liquid fuels separated during liftoff of rockets. I guess ark welding uses helium. Was that what the O ring thing was? And challenger that was keeping the helium out of Oh buddy, was it the mazy tanks type?

I can't go from Challenger to Macy's thanks gimmick they parade.

I need it.

I need some kind of a stepic stone. Oh man, all right, the Challenger Titanic, Macy's macy Thanksgiving they parade. There we go, Okay, The parade requires more than three hundred thousand cubic feet, well the volume of three and a half Olympic sized swimming pools of helium to inflate the balloons. The biggest of these balloons require twelve hundred cubic feet, or approximately twenty five hundred bathtubs worth of helium.

So that's pretty crazy. You don't hear that as a standard unit of measurement that much anymore.

What it's bathtubs? Yeah? Yeah, I think the jacuzzis really put the kebaj on that. Helium's obviously a finite resource, and the cost to fill the balloons is more than half a million dollars. Now, in nineteen fifty eight, this was a problem because there was a helium shortage, and organizers of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade grappled with how to continue without helium. In what seems like the most complex solution imaginable, they rigged up construction cranes to hold these balloons aloft, almost like a giant gallows or something, and travel down the parade route admirably but also sort of psychotically. The only years the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade were ever canceled were during World War Two between nineteen forty two and nineteen forty four, and Macy's did their part for the war effort by donating six hundred and fifty pounds of rubber from the balloons to the government. They considered calling off the Thanksgiving Day parade in nineteen sixty three since JFK had just been killed the week before, but they opted to continue to keep up the spirits of the nation.

The nation needed to heal with Yes with Big Snoopy.

Now, it takes roughly ninety minutes to fill each balloon, so it's roughly ten hours to fill all of the balloons used for the parade. This process begins the night before the parade at a staging area near the American Museum of Natural History at seventy seventh Street and Central Park West, and this draws all manner of tourists and locals to come and take a sneak peak the night before, which I would actually if I were over here. I'm usually in a MEP in Massachusetts with my family for Thanksgiving, but if I was here, i'd like to see that. That'd be kind of cool. Hilariously, it only takes fifteen minutes to to flate one of those giant balloons. They use the same method that everyone uses who's ever deflated an air mattress. They just open up the vents and lay on it in the street and fold it over on itself. And there you go. And now for my single favorite part of this episode, I am so excited to talk about this. We mentioned the deflation technique. For the first few years of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, organizers didn't have a deflation procedure in place. Instead, from nineteen twenty seven to nineteen thirty two, the handlers would simply release the balloons into the sky at the end of the parade, which admittedly must have looked pretty awesome, but, as we will see, caused all manner of airborne chaos. In this first year, they merely popped after reaching a certain altitude. But Macy's didn't like this, so they strengthened the balloons the following year, and introduced a truly bizarre Willy Wonka like contest. The balloon fabric was printed with the return address on it, and those who found the balloon, or more realistically, had the thing PLoP down in your front lawn, were invited to send it back to Macy's and collect one hundred dollars reward. Now, the one hundred dollars prize, this was nothing to sneeze at because this was close to an eighteen hundred dollars value today. And needless to say, it became a race to find these balloons, and things got intense. I'd like to cite a December first, nineteen twenty eight article from The New York Times in full. The headline is four Macy's Balloons land. Four of the five balloons representing grotesque figures and released at the close of the Macy's Christmas Day parade on Thanksgiving have been accounted for last night. Executives of the store said. The fifth balloon, a fantastic Ghost, was reported as having been cited moving out to sea over the Rockaways with a flock of seagulls in pursuit. The first balloon to a light was the sky Tiger. It came down on the roof of a home of Sea Shepherd and Richmond Hill, Law Island. Its arrival stirred the neighborhood to a tug of war for its possession. Missus Shepherd's two sons ran to the roof to obtain it, while neighbors and motorists rushed up from all directions. The rubberized silk burst into dozens of fragments. The capture of the early Bird balloon was affected more peaceably. It alighted to the premises of Missus Lena Stender of Mill Village, Long Island. The sky Elephant, the third to be recorded, descended on a dock at Fourth and Front Streets in Long Island City, and the fourth balloon, the Hummingbird, was last seen in the East River. It was broken in half and both sections were floating with a tide pursued by two tug boats. So I almost want to stop and read through a list of these early balloons that determine which of these would have been the most terrifying to have land in your yard. You've got sea serpents, a giant docks, and a giant hippo nearly rammed the newly completed Empire's state building before heading out to sea. It was reported by a fisherman one hundred miles out of Rockaway Point quote walking on water, the tail of a one hundred and seventy six foot dragon narrowly avoided shattering windows and several office buildings in Midtown. But the horrors got worse for those involved in the nascent world of aviation. In nineteen thirty one, when the so called balloon Race was in its fourth year, pilot Clarence E. Chamberlain, who it's worth noting, was the second man to fly across the Atlantic after Charles Limberg picked up a plane ride of sightseers in Brooklyn and was flying over the Burrow when he saw a giant balloon of Felix the Cat and another giant balloon of a giant pig gliding over Jamaica Bay, which is a perfectly normal sentence. At the suggestion of one of his passengers, the pilot brought his plane parallel to the Felix balloon and managed to snag it with his wing, as well as lassoing the pig with some rope. So here's a guy flying with a Felix the Cat balloon on his wing and a rope that's towing a pig. Unfortunately, the felix the cat broke free, but he succeeded in bringing the pig down to earth, and he collected the prize from Macy's word of his endeavor must have gotten out because the following year, in nineteen thirty two, a twenty two year old flight student named Annett Gibson flew her plane directly into one of these balloons, a yellow striped tom Cat, which was one hundred feet across. The fabric wrapped around the left wing of her plane, causing it to go into a deep tailspin, and she basically panicked and shut off the ignition, thinking that this would prevent fire when the plane crashed. When you're in a tailspin, try to get out of the tailspin before just turning the engine off and giving up. There were two hundred and fifty feet from crashing into the rooftop of Queens when her flight instructor intervened and they switched seats so the instructor could take control of the plane. But the cabin door of the aircraft, which had been opened to try to lasso the balloon in, was still left open, and Annette nearly fell out. Her foot got caught in the safety strap and she was able to pull herself back in, and the instructor saved them, both, seemingly violating Darwin's law. But she would go on to become a friend of Amelia Earhart, So I guess she didn't give up on her flying dream despite that stupid, stupid choice. Did anyone ask her why she did that? I don't know. I'm not sure.

I just assumed she was like woman crazy, like in the in the like as in the fashion of the time. I don't mean that was a real reason. They were just like, ah, what a dame, What a silly dame, Like she's a hard study. Did the voices tell her to do that? What intrusive thought was like I'm gonna nine to eleven one of the Macy's balloons.

I don't know, I should add this wasn't during the parade. I want to add. This was after they'd let them go.

Oh okay, and she was hunting it for the reward money and was like, this is how I'm going to bring it down.

Maybe she thought she could run into it and it would pop and just like the fabric would just kind of harmlessly be on the wing. I don't I don't know, But can you imagine the flight instructor was with her? So can you imagine flight instructors being like, no, what are you doing? What are you doing? No? No, no, man? Can you imagine being a.

Like a really World War One veteran then when like with your weird like boardwalk Empire assassin guy plastic thing that covers the part of your face to the gas eight and you're just doped up on the real good morphine and you're like out on Long Island Sound and you look up and you see like a good hippo, Yeah, a hippo or a ghost like flying by.

That would be awesome. That's what I mean. This is this is the stuff I thought you would like about this. No, you're right, you're right. So far no word of this incident made the news, So I should probably read more of the reports from the time and see if anybody asked her why she thought to do that. And New Yorkers decided that it was worth more to keep fragments of this balloon as souvenirs, so they tore him to pieces, and none of them will returned to Macy's and it's probably not a surprise that the following year Macy's ended its They call it the Balloon Race, the race define the balloons. They kept the tradition alive, though in a scaled down way, in nineteen thirty three, by releasing thousands of small balloons, two hundred of which had tags offering one dollar a free merchandise at Macy's. And these balloons they were recovered as far away as Nova Scotia, which is pretty impressive. One current organizer of the Macy's Thanks Steven Day Parade, it was interviewed by People magazine, expressed a desire for the full size character balloons to be released at the end of the twenty twenty four parade in honor of its one hundredth anniversary, so we may get to see a giant hippo floating out past the rockaways.

Yet this is looking to have a bit of fun, and Net flew straight into the tom Cat.

Yeah. I've never found a good explanation. All right, it's a hell of a thing. It truly is.

Uh am i up, I just can't stop thinking about what that was.

Like.

She's just like in the cockpit, like I'm gonna do it I'm gonna get that cat.

Or were they both just drunk?

Was like the flight instructor like, ah, this would be great, you get the cat.

You won't do it, you won't.

She's on like old timey cocaine. She's like, I'm gonna get that. I'm gonna get it.

Okay, you know what. I'm looking at a picture of it now, hang on, I'm sending it to you. It's small enough that I almost get it. It's like it's like the size of like an RV, which I mean still my first thought wouldn't be to fly into it, but it's like not that huge. Dude.

Everything I know about flying is like and I know very little is like, oh yeah, you know, the slightest gust of wind on your tail can send you flying into the ground and you'll die.

And this woman was just like, no, I'm gonna get that balloon. That guy. I love her. I love her so much. I love that she was like she went on to be like a major pilot.

Well with Cahoni's like that, no wonder, she didn't fear anything.

Oh she was like twenty twenty one. Wait, she's kind of gorgeous. Wow, she's like really really pretty. No, that tracks.

Yeah, a hot twenty one year old flying like I was twenty one once. I knew beautiful twenty one year old women once they're a special brand of vane.

Good for her. That's hot girl.

Oh survived into the late eighties, so she married a rich attorney. She was just like a society dame and aviatrix. Uh God, good for her, and spent more like she had a lot of time to think about what she had done, plotting her revenge. She's like eighty, She's like tottering towards the plane one more time. They're like, Grandma, what are you doing.

She's like, I'm gonna get that sound of a picture. I got one last flight in me. Hello, boys, did you miss me?

Oh?

We gotta do Independence Day sometimes, Yeah, I kind of I'm shocked we haven't. Yeah, uh, where were we? Skypilots moving in the sky.

Pilots moving these balloons around and killing them is more difficult than you might expect. They are, in many cases several stories tall, and as we'll discover, extremely susceptible to high winds. Up to ninety people or needed to anchor and navigate each balloon, and they do so by grasping onto ropes affixed to the bottom and sides. The ropes are for some reason called bones, and they require a specific way of handling so that they remain taut throughout the parade. All of these people are requested to be in good health and must weigh a minimum of one hundred and twenty pounds. They are led by the mysterious balloon pilot, who is basically the captain of each balloon. They spend the entire parade walking backwards in front of their balloons, guiding their team of marchers and two anchor vehicles that also tow the balloons. As you can imagine, the balloon pilots are the most experienced balloon handlers. To qualify, they must demonstrate that they can walk the entire two and a half mile route backwards without stumbling, as well as sit for three field trainings and classroom training.

Each year. One balloon pilot has admitted to training by walking backwards through their entire neighborhood. And this is all done on a volunteer basis. Insane want to be a volunteer lunar. You've been using this term without explaining it. I think the good people are owed an explanation. It's a specific kind of porn fetish. I believe people who fetishize balloons fully get it, but I'm aware of it, which really sums up my approach.

To so many lies. For those of you seeking a chance to loon for Macy's good luck. As per tradition, all of the handlers are either macy employees themselves or friends and family of one. So this is a good long con for us, though.

We you know you, yeah you.

There's look, there's twenty twenty seven acres of Macy's. You're gonna find a cute Macy's employee. You're going to cozy up to her. We get access to the balloon, and then we pilot. We drive it into the White House or Trump Tower. I guess that's probably easier.

It's closer, yeah, close.

Or the Union Square Guitar Center. Who's done the most farm. Fifteen hundred volunteer spots are up yearly, and they go quickly. There are there are nearly ten thousand participants, from clouds to cheerleaders, to dancers to marching bands to the balloon handlers and the pilot.

I don't like the phrase balloon handler. That really I just don't.

I don't like balloon pilot. I mean like it implies that you're to meet, implies that you're like as I think. I hear that, and I think of the Hindenburg, not like a guy walking backwards, you know what it is.

I think a balloon handler. I think of the people who make balloon animals of the towns. Yeah, you're describing a clown. Well, no, I mean sometimes you just have people that are really in the making balloon.

Shapes, do you, buddy, Yeah, how many civilian balloon makers do you?

Well? Quite a few. I mean I grew up in Boston and like Faniel Hall and stuff like that, and like you know, like city squares, you got the guys with the briefcases up when you fill the bucks in, then they get a hat or whatever and they and they make, you know, a little unicorns and stuff out of Not always.

You're describing as street balloon artist. I've never seen this once. Oh come on, no, I've had I have more dignity for the humble living statue than I do for a street balloon artist.

For sake, street balloon ars, it gives you something to take home. What's a still statue? Do joy no we used to be a proper country. Well.

The balloon MVP of the Macy's Parade is, of course Snoopy. There have been nine variations of him since he made his debut as Aviator Snoopy in nineteen sixty eight. In nineteen sixty nine he was Astronauts Snoopy to mark the Apollo eleven moon landing. There was also ice skating Snoopy, Winter Snoopy somehow different from ice skating Snoopy, Millennium Snoopy Snoopy, The Flying Ace of revamped Aviator design Snoopy with woodstock, and for twenty twenty three Beagle Scout Snoopy.

You're an Eagle Scout. I am that's really cool. No, it's not. There's no joke there. I genuinely find that really cool. What was the project again?

It was something that it was like building a little garden and some benches at the local old folks home.

Oh.

I thought the Boy Scouts were like an edging bankruptcy because of all the molestation. How they have money to influence the Macy's Parade.

I would almost imagine that the Charles Schultz h State State is really into the Boy Scouts in a nice way. Huh. And maybe this was his way of trying to are their way of trying to pick up the boy scouts. I don't know. Well. Although Snoopy is the most frequently appearing balloon, he is an impressive forty three parades to his name, he is not the biggest. This honor belongs to Superman, or more accurately, Superman the Third. The Superman balloon debuted in nineteen thirty nine to show those Jerry's what was coming to him, and reappeared in nineteen sixty six to show those hippies what was coming to him.

Ah, and his third appearance in nineteen eighty, the Man of Steel got a supersized makeover, towering eighty feet tall, making him the tallest balloon to ever appear in the parade.

Was that tied to the First Reeves movie? Yeah, but also to show the Ruskies what they got coming to him? So you're the Moscow Olympics. I think it's related.

Person, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Another beloved balloon is a green apatosaurus dinosaur that appeared in the parade thirteen times before being retired in nineteen seventy six after being displayed inside the American Museum of Natural Histories, Theodore Roosevelt Wrotetunda for five days. In other words, they held a state funeral for the balloon. In two thousand and four, Yeah It's nice. In two thousand and four, Spongeob SquarePants made his debut as the parade's first square shaped balloon. It takes more than six hundred internal tie lines to give SpongeBob his distinctive look, and the following year they launched the Blue Sky Gallery initiative to incorporate the work of contemporary artists into parade balloons. To date, they've included works by Jeff Coons, Keith Herring, Better, Tim Burton, Takashimir Kami Kause, and Yooi Kusama. Jeff Coons is already balloons. I was in a stretch Cowards. I should do Herman Nietzsche. He's a guy paints in blood or just the scream are here?

Yeah, that'll be cool. Yeah, a monkst the scream. I tell you about how I mean. As you can probably imagine, this is one of the happiest days of my life. I was a kid and we were going to the local little harvest fair in our town, probably around this time of year, and I remember like not being all that excited to go. I don't know. And we pulled up and what's like in the distance and I see the unmistakable site of the Titanic sinking, and I'm getting closer to it, and it is a giant inflatable back end of the Titanic angled down as a slide that someone at this harvest fans quaint bobbing for apples cinnamon apple dumpling contest type place decided that was a good idea to rent a sinking ty. I think this must have been right after the movie came out, and I couldn't believe it. It's not just about the balloons, though, Higo, how many times you have to tell you it's not just about the balloons?

God, get it right.

No, there's always making about the.

Balloons, but we're neglecting the real flesh and blood humans who perform often in frigid temperatures. Twenty eighteen is the coldest parade on record, with performers like Dinah Ross, John Legend, and Martina McBride lip syncing in nineteen degrees. According to Wikipedia, the first celebrity performer to grease the parade was Milton Burrel in nineteen forty nine, followed by Jimmy Duranty the following year. You must remember this, that was amazing Jimmy wedding. Jimmy Duranty's a different version of it, not the Jimmy Duranty one, although we should have uh less expected guests include Jazz Great Lionel Hampton, a post child stardom, Shirley Temple a pre Partridge Family, Shirley Jones, Big Band leader, Benny Goodman, Amber Tamblin's father, Russ Tamblin.

I think he was in a lot of Roger Corman movies.

Yeah, he was in West Side Story, Oh yeah, yeah yeah, and he's in Twin Peaks And I'm the only reason I know.

Yeah.

Tony Bennett makes sense, Willie Mays, Gene Krupa, The Cast of the Monsters, Nina Simone, God, she must have loved that makes Crackers like just up there like angrily comping Pano, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, William Shatner, The Temptations, Evil Canievel, The Village People, Andy Kaufman, Robert sta Bobby Stacks, Lou Rawls Hell Yeah, good for Lou Rolls, Twiggy Nah, I don't like that. British people shouldn't be allowed She's British. Yeah, they shouldn't be allowed to do that. President Ronald Reagan American Yeah, Shelley Duvall, Kelsey Grammer, Dave Thomas of presumably of Wendy's, Wendy l Cool, Jy Bo Diddley, the Baja Men twice.

Also foreign nationals.

They should not be allowed here, Sharon Jones and the DAP Kings, Rip and Rick Astley, who, of course, Rick rolled the crowd during two thousand and eight by making a surprise appearance of the float of the animated TV shows Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends on Cartoon Network. Each year, Broadway Musical or two will perform a number outside of the front door of Macy's. Despite the old time equality of this segment, it was only introduced in the seventies, And of course we cannot neglect to mention the non famous human performers, the almost three thousand marching band members from across the country who entertain along the parade route.

Were you ever in a marching band in high school?

One year I was in the pit. I played bass, guitar. I hated it in a marching band. Yeah, in the in the pit, yeah, you play the tube lines basically, it just helps it sound better.

I just I'm more like confused about how you were able to. I've never heard of a pit for a marching band.

Oh yeah, it's where all the auxiliary percussion is, like all the marimbos and xylophones and bells and stuff. Yeah, only the drum line marches. All the other percussion gets to sit still, which rules.

Oh, we had a whole line of all the brass and everything. But I don't think we had a pit. I wasn't in it, so I'm not totally sure. But that's cool. No, no, it's not. No, it's no, I don't have no. No, it's a weird cult.

It's like yeah, it's like it's like the levels of it has all the incest of all the other niche high school of drama club, like drama club, cross country, you know all that stuff. But no about cachet and we were egged, you were agged. Yeah that's horrible. I'm Pennsylvania and sucks. Oh yeah, what else did I hate about high school?

We're going to take a quick break. But We'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Keep going, where are we?

Oh?

Welcome to your worst night, my friends. We are about to give a special TMI shout out to the rock Atshigo. Have you ever seen the rock Cats live and in person.

I've never seen them, but I know about the horrific life of an exotic tiger that they lead.

I've seen them literally more times than I can count. It became this strange my first trips to New York as a kid, where I was brought here by my parents and my aunt to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. I was very young, and I probably I must have seen it at least a dozen times over the years, so I have a soft spot in my heart for them. They have been performing with the parade since nineteen fifty seven. But shockingly, the dance troop that's become so associated with Christmas in New York actually got their start in Saint Louis in nineteen twenty five when they were known as the Missouri Rockets. That's such a New York story. Get your start in the Midwestern or a totally different name. You move to the big city, try to Reinvent Yourself creator Russell Markert got the idea for what we now know was The Rockets after he was impressed by a UK dance troupe in nineteen twenty two, Zigfried Follies, which was a review show. Basically, here's the closest thing I can think of how to describe it. He was seized with this can do big is better American spirit and quoted as saying, if I got a chance, they get a group of American girls who would be taller and have longer legs and could do really complicated tap routines and I high kicks. Man, they'd really knock your socks off. He didn't say, man, but everything else is a quote that didn't really show up.

Jerry.

The themis and themis all of them. Russell Markert envisioned a drill team that moved as a single dancer, and when the group toured New York, their show was attended by a theater magnate named sl Roxy Rothefeld. Roxy was so taken by the display of athleticism and dance acumen that he hired this group for his Roxy Theater. And this move required a new name, and so the former Missouri Rockets was reborn as the Roxyettes, which then morphed into the American Rockets, the Rose and finally the Rockets. I have a question, what's that? How much do you think this was just horniness? Oh? Oh, greater than seventy five percent?

Because I didn't think other than the high character, I didn't think they were known as like an especially amazing dance troupe.

Oh no, no that's not true.

No, they're extremely talented, he said, unconvincingly.

I mean, I don't know enough about dance to be able to like back that up with anything. But no, they're like really well, okay, let me really hot and tall. That's what it is. It's just tall women. It is shocking to me how every tall woman I know hates being tall, and it makes me so sad. Yeah, now, this Roxy character. He was one of the visionaries behind Radio City Music Hall, along with John D. Rockefeller, who bankrolled Rockefeller Center. I always assumed that the rocket were named after Rockefeller and Rockefeller Center, but I guess they got the name before Rockefeller Center was a thing. But when Radio City opened on December twenty seventh, nineteen thirty two, Roxy tapped the Rockettes to perform and it's been their home ever since. A year later, in nineteen thirty three, the Radio City Rockets debut They're iconic Christmas Spectacular, which was designed by future Judy Garland husband and Liza's dad, Vincente Minelli. During the rest of the year, the Rockets were the opening act for screenings of the latest movies back when Radio City was mostly a movie theater. Did you know that Radio City used to be mainly for movies?

I assume all those beautiful buildings in like every decaying American city was like a movie theater. He was a beautiful one in downtown New Cumberland where I grew up. Really, it wasn't even a first run theater when I was growing up. There was literally the two dollar theater which you went in and had all the gilded you know. I saw the big velvet curtain and gilded pillars and such. Wow did they get yepifi?

Did millennials come in and turn it into one of those like twenty dollars Hamburger and Martiniz while you watch like Breakfast at Tiffany's kind of places. I'll report back at Christmas. Yeah, so here, I don't know that much about dancing to be able to offer an informed opinion on the rockets dancing abilities. But I do know a little thing about elbow grease, and damn it, the Rockets have it. Over three thousand women have performed as Rockets since the Christmas Spectacular is opening in nineteen thirty three, and they are somewhat famously all on the taller side. These days. The height requirement is between five foot six and five foot ten and a half inches, and by placing the tallest girls in the center and lining up and descending order of height, the dancers can create the optical illusion of all being the same height, which is interesting. Imagine it's like a forced perspective thing. I don't know. I thought they were like running out of money.

I thought they were like bankrupt at some point, like people just stop giving it about them.

I'm not saying anything about that. I see that the Rockets Spectacular was canceled in twenty twenty for obvious reasons, and it lost millions as a result.

I think there's still kick in. I don't have an anti Rocket's agenda. I just think it's horny. It's I don't really see what sustained that for fifty years, one hundred years, however long this shit happened.

Okay, let me talk about this. Every year, over a thousand dancers auditioned to be a rock At only eighty make it so. First of all, you know the cream Rises, they've got to be extremely good at what they do. But the Rockets, they have a somewhat complicated legacy due to what I'll generously call outdated beauty standards hype restriction. Aside, the Rockets reportedly didn't hire a black dancer named Jennifer Jones until they eighteen eighty seven, fifty five years after they taputed at Radio City. That's a bad track record. Allow me to quote a piece from the November twentieth, two thousand and five issue of The New York Times. The Rockets are instantly recognizable symbols, but what they represent depends on who is doing the interpreting. To some, they're step for dancers. That's a great pun there, with the step in and the step. That's good. Objectified women reduced to nothing but legs and teeth to others, their glamour personified the last cherish remains of a guys'n' dolls style nightlife and to yet another part of the audience. This is me their glorious kitch as amusing as they are entertaining. Actually no, I'm the next one also. But one thing is constant, their sheer physical accomplishment. Even in a city full of sweating, striving talent, The Rockets may well be the hardest working women in show business, and this is true. They truly work their asses off. They rehearse for six hours a day, six days a week, for six weeks before the Christmas Spectacular opens. That's a lot of sixes. Maybe they mistook Satan for Santa. A Rocket named Katie Daniel told The Wall Street Journal in twenty thirteen. Rehearsals are an all consuming process that requires a lot of grit, focus and attention. We practice all day together, and then we go home and practice on our own, and then wake up and practice more. It's NonStop Christmas. There are two separate casts of Rockets, with thirty six women each, and each cast has four swings for a total of eighty and these swings are waiting in the wings in case, I don't know, somebody's achilles tendon acts up on stage and they gotta tag out. I'm not sure so this makes these six show days slightly more bearable. But still, that's upwards of one thousand, two hundred kicks a day. It's leg day every day.

How many kicks a day?

Twelve hundred kicks a day. It's a lot of kicks. It's a lot of kicks.

As Bruce Lee once said, I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once but one kick ten thousand times.

I fear the woman who has perfected that kick ten thousand times.

In heels, Well said le go, you should start marketing that on Cafe Press or something. I guarantee it'll become a girl Boss slogan.

Some of these women are required to wear heavy robes from the Nativity scene, for which they use real camels. One Rocket was later quoted as saying, standing still in that heavy robe, you can feel yourself dripping sweat. And there's a similar problem with the Santa costu, in which weighs forty pounds. But the ladies like to wear it because it's the only costume in which they can wear flats. In a truly remarkable profile on the New York Times from two thousand and five that I quoted earlier called The sweat Soaked Life of a Glamorous Rocket. Writer Susan Dominus describes these women as leaving their homes at six in the morning and not arriving back until quarter past the lane, heating up a frozen pizza, feeding their baby, and getting up to do it all again the next day. Six days a week, they have to perform ultra quick changes backstage. The fastest is just seventy eight seconds. That's between the March of the Toy Soldiers and New York at Christmas. And this change includes shoes, hats, and earrings while all crammed in the dressing room with seven other dancers, and what I consider to be the ultimate indignity, they all have to do their own hair and make up themselves. Jesus. I know Radio City management don't comment on what the Rockets earn, but dancers told The New York Times and this aforementioned two thousand and five piece, that they typically get paid on par with other Broadway dancers. So it's a salary that roughly breaks down to one hundred and thirty five dollars a show, and that was in two thousand and five, so that's closer to two hundred and thirteen dollars today sounds I mean, I guess it's ninety minutes worth of work. But that's a hell of a lot of work, oh my god. But because they form more than one time a day, and then they get overtime and all sorts of other little perks, it's a well paying gig. It's also apparently they get health insurance all year too, which is kind of cool. Yeah, I know right. One of my favorite anecdotes from one of the many rock Ass profiles I read was that they would often get pumped up before showtime by listening to Blondie Duran Duran, and just before the curtain went up the final countdown by Europe. Well sure, yeah. Also, their shoes are micd up so that the synchronous steps are audible to the crowd, and every Christmas Spectacular season they run through fourteen ninety six double A batteries. I'm told the numbers don't really translate well on TMI. That's something that people glaze over for. They usually like like the stories like the woman running into the balloon in mid air, But I don't know, I like some of these numbers. Well, good because we got more of them coming your way. Planning for the parade takes about a year and a half or I don't know what, five hundred some odd days. Yeah, that's about right.

Fifty thousand hours of labor. Fifty thousand hours of labor. More than thirty skilled artists work year round to prepare the parade. Floats require three hundred pounds of glitter Jesus, two hundred and forty gallons of paint, more than half a mile of hand sewn skirt and fringe wrap, plus two hundred pounds of confetti.

Oh, I love this story.

They managed to cut some corners though on this step. In twenty twelve, for reasons that are still undetermined, shredded documents from the Nassau County Police Department ended up as confetti in the parade. These included clearly visitible sensitive information like people's social security numbers, license plate number, and banking data, as well as details about undercover officers. Also found for notes about Mitt Romney's motorcade from the final presidential debate, which took place at Hofstra University. A Macy spokesperson defended the company by saying they only use multicolored confetti and were investigating how the private documents ended up in the parade. He said Macy's uses commercially manufactured multi colored confetti, not shredded, homemade or printed paper of any kind.

In the parade.

It is not unusual for spectators to bring and throw their own confetti in the direction of parade participants from the sidelines. So some in Long Eye, Long Island cop showed up with his dirty laundry paperwork and hawked in snoopy.

That's my theory.

God, I love this country. Macy's team designs about seven hundred new costumes every year, creating an overall wardrobe of forty two hundred costumes valued at an estimated two million dollars. About two hundred costume fitters are on site the morning of the parade to help everyone get into costume, including the custom made costumes for Santa and Missus Claus and now one of the balloons themselves, the real star of the show. It is just about the balloons, Jordan. For years all of the Mac's balloons were made at Macy's parade studio, a former Tutsie roll factory in Hoboken.

I know. That's the universal theory of TMI. The Tutsi beast stirs. That's a balloon. I would see the beast Yeah, braining.

Tutsi rolls out of its distended anus.

Uh he must roll.

They have since moved to a gergantuan thirty thousand square foot warehouse in Monachi, New Jersey.

Designers are buried under there.

Yeah right. The designers are effictually known as balloon attics, balloonatics balloonatics by the way I said, it could also mean that thing balloon addict. The term comes from the praise where oh is that where the term comes from. The term comes from the parade's very first balloon covered float from nineteen twenty six, which was decked out in traditional balloons and called balloonatics. They didn't just get it from the easy, lazy pun or whatever Macy's loves to myth make this. Macy's had to come up with other new words to describe its balloon creations. There are falloons, falloons, or balloon or balloon floats. Falloons like a racial slur, balloonicles balloonicles sounds like a medical condition. You got to go in and get your balloonicles drained. The nurse is going to row you over and check you for balloonicals and trikalloons or balloon tricycles.

That's not even a pun.

The balloonatics begin with pencil sketches of each character, which takes into account both the aero dynamics and engineering. These sketches are made into scaled down clay models that are used to create casts of the balloons. Speaking do you hear that Wallace in Gramt is? There's only going to be one more Wallace in Gramt movie because the company that makes their clay went out of business and there's literally only enough to make one more movie coming out next year. That's a proprietary it's a proprietary clay formula that holds up especially well for stop motion. And when they announced that they were going out of business, the company just bought the entire stock and there's only enough of it left for one more movie.

And they won't sell them. The recipe of Maygate I don't know, I don't know. UM that's gonna be a like a some change dot org petition these bunch of nerds.

Two miniature replicas are created, one that's marked with technical details and one that's painted in the balloon's colors. The models are immersed in water to figure out how much helium they'll need to float. And then finally, the schematics are scanned by a computer and the fabric pieces are cut and heat sealed to create the various air chambers of the balloon. For years, the balloons were made of rubber, but these days they made of polyurethane fabric. Overall, the process takes roughly between five months to a year. When the balloons are finished, they are tested rigorously at the warehouse. This includes six hours of inflation and a skin stress test known by the highly technical term thumping. These balloons, which regularly weigh around four hundred pounds, are then deflated, packed up, and driven through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is briefly closed to traffic just before midnight the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, thus stymying the duires of the world. I was thinking that in order to fit through the tunnel, the balloons and floats must be packed down into boxes that are no more than twelve and a half feet high and eight feet wide, which is obviously a challenge. Then once they arrive in Manhattan, they'll get parade ready in front of the American Museum of Natural History, where people assemble to gather and watch the inflation. Does it take place at.

Like four in the morning.

Yeah, it's some ungodly are Balloons traditionally last about eight years before they need to be replaced or retired just someone walks out and shoots it in the back of the head. The price to design and build a brand new character balloon is one hundred and ninety thousand dollars, with subsequent appearances costing ninety thousand dollars a year. Macy's will not disclose how much the parade costs each year, saying it's a gift to the city, and as with any gift, you don't leave the price tag on you.

Firs.

How much money do you get from the city to run that show? That's pretty good doesn't cost them anything. In addition to the three million people who turn out in person each year, more than forty four million watch the parade annually on TV. First broadcast by a radio in nineteen thirty two. Jesus Christ, that is depressing, I know. Next we have a really big balloon that's sort of a racist character.

Next, there's.

Is that Babe Ruth next to marching band from Topeka. Look at them go and next the crew a PYGMS. Yeah right, look at that a spirit?

How are they? How are they?

They'll never see their glistening homeland again. I don't know why he's talking like FDR in this. I mean, we're doing the Hindenberg explosion guy. Yeah, yeah, we're doing the O humanity guys.

True.

It was televised locally in nineteen thirty nine as an experimental early TV broadcast, and finally went national in nineteen forty eight. It's had a host of hosts, most notably TV news anchors, though from nineteen sixty nineteen sixty two to nineteen seventy one it was co hosted by the first Lady of Television, Betty White, alongside Bonanza star Lorne Green.

How about that? You're the only person that want Planet Earth? You care about that other than me? About Lorne Green? For the folks.

Since nineteen fifty five, NBC has been the official broadcast partner of the parade, but that hasn't stopped those rascals at CBS from trying to hog the glory. Per Wikipedia, CBS, which has a studio in Times Square, unauthorized coverage as the Thanksgiving Day Parade on CBS, the Macy's Parade committee has their hands tied with this situation. While they can endorse an official broadcaster, they cannot award exclusive rights like a sports broadcast since the parade takes place in public, So instead they re routed the parade away from CBS's studio camera, thus making it significantly more difficult for the network to horn in on their racket. God love them ough this country. As we mentioned earlier, the popularity of the parade was enhancespite its inclusion of the film Miracle on thirty Fourth Street starring Little Matilda. What do you think of that remake?

I don't really remember the remake.

Richard Attenborough or Borough one of the Attenboroughs is Santa in that right? Yeah?

Yeah.

The original was released in nineteen forty seven. The movie featured footage from the actual parade. Cameras were placed both along the parade route and on the third floor of a nearby apartment to capture shots of what you describe as the electric atmosphere of the nineteen four six parade. Hilariously, the film's leading lady, Marin O'Hara, best known to you as the mom in the original Parent Trap, requested a police escort to shop in Macy's after they filmed the parade segments. The assistant director responded, I know New Yorkers, they aren't going to pay any attention to you. And don't wear bandana around your head or dark glasses.

Just be normal.

Good advice not to go too deep on Miracle on thirty fourth Street. I will never do an episode on this, so this is all you're getting. Twentieth Century Fox had Daryl F. Xenik insisted that it'll be released in May because he believed that more people go to the movies in warmer weather. What I think, because movie theaters were the like al air conditioned places.

Then yeah.

All mention of Christmas was scrubbed from the promotional materials for the film as a result of Xenik's brainstorm. The trailer features a fictional producer strolling a backlot where a bunch of the famous actors and actresses endorse the movie, and the Santa character is so small in the poster that he's mostly unidentifiable. The movie also features Natalie Wood in her child star face. She arguably made one of the most successful jumps from child star to adult actor, a transition affected by her role alongside James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Director Nicholas Ray was wary of casting her in that film due to her reputations a squeaky clean child starlet. But then while on a night out with friends, she got into a car accident. Upon hearing this, Ray rushed to the hospital. While in delirium, Would overheard the doctor murmuring and calling her a damn juvenile delinquent, at which point she yelled to Ray, do you hear what he called me?

Nick?

He called me a damn juvenil nile delinquent. Now do I get the part? And then Robert Wagner drowned her, and Christopher Walkin was there, and Christopher Walkin asked himself, do.

You think he'll come clean about that? At some point.

Wagner or walking either Walkin probably not Wagner, like a deathbed confession.

Maybe. I don't know. He's had so many times to like do that and so many like very special interview. Oh yeah, I think there was a documentary made by I forget if it was the daughter that they had together or if it was just Natalie's daughter from another marriage, But yeah, they had some documentary on Natalie would a few years ago. I remember watching it during pandemic freshman year, and yeah, it was like he had some big emotional like it wasn't me moment, it was walking, Uh, Jordan, Yes, speaking of disasters. Oh yeah, I mean I'm a disaster guy. Yeah. From large boat to large balloons. It has not been always smooth sailing for Oh, almost had a beautiful transition there. It has not always been smooth sailing for these Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade performers.

Speaking of Natalie Wood, it hasn't always been smooth sailing for the macy How dare you look?

You wouldn't so I had to. Yeah, there's other things went wrong. Mistakes were made in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Now, most of the problems with the parade come down to the balloons. Specifically, balloons over the years have hit electrical wires, signs, tree branches, and street lights, deflating parts of the balloons and even entering onlookers.

Uh.

To kind of minimize this, the balloons are divided into several individual segments so that the show can go on if somebody, you know, losing an arm or a leg or something in nineteen thirty one, a balloon in the shape of the wrestler the Terrible Turk, burst after hitting a traffic pole. The New York Times described it thus, Terrible Turk does split as laughing children see him to plate in shame. It's like some old like variety headline or something. Buffo, Buffo, who've been together too long? My friends. There's a persistent rumor that a Felix the Cat balloon burst into flames after hitting some high tension wires in nineteen thirty one. I've done some digging on this, and apparently there's some truth in the myth, but it is kind of a myth. This actually occurred days after the Macy's Day parade, after the balloon, which had been remember this was in the days when they just set the balloons free, came to rest in West nor with New Jersey, which was yet another reason why the plan to have these balloons just flowed away was really stupid. After the guy in the plane tried to hook it on its wing and missed and the balloon floated off. It flew over to New Jersey, connected with some high tension wires and burst into flames. A mini Hindenburg In nineteen fifty six, Mighty Mouse lost his battle against forty five degree Wins, veering into a street sign and collapsing dramatically near Columbus. Afterwards, the balloon was retired from the parade. I guess it was that badly damaged. In nineteen fifty six, the Popeye balloon made a splash after heavy rains accumulated in the brim of his hat and overflowed and drenched the crowd below, and a similar thing happened a few years later in nineteen sixty two with the Donald Duck balloon, who also wore a hat. This was a relatively minor mishap, but major problems can occur. In nineteen seventy one, the balloons were grounded for the first time in the parade's history due to heavy rains and strong winds. In Thanksgiving nineteen eighty five, one of the rainiest on record, Kermit the Frog, was blown into a tree and ripped. The following year, Superman's right arm ripped off in the middle of the parade after getting blown into a tree, and in nineteen ninety three, Sonic the Hedgehog the very first video game character to get their own balloon. Knocked over a street lamp, injuring a spectator in the process. But this is all preamble for the Thanksgiving disaster of nineteen ninety seven. Macy's Annis harrillibus horribilius. How do you say that? Whatever you said, Annis, I did, yeah, which is fitting because nineteen ninety seven was the year that Beavis and butt Head had a balloon. It wasn't actually flown, though, they just tied it to a building that was on the parade route, which is pretty funny. There was a Kurt Loader hosted special Beavis and butt heead Do Thanksgiving, which I would like to watch. I'm sure it's on YouTube. Maybe not. But this was a very blustery day with winds reaching up to forty miles an hour, and the balloons were difficult to control. NYPD officers were enlisted to stab both Barney and the Pink Panther balloon over safety concerns and to fully explore the scope of this truly disastrous parade. I would like to cite I don't think we've ever done this before in full on New York Times article by Douglas Martin published on November twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven under the headline Macy's Parade of Balloons gets one thing it doesn't need, wind take us away.

Sudden bursts of punishing wind spun havoc at Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade yesterday, as many of the parade's signature helium filled balloons were damaged, and as four spectators were hurt when one of the giant balloons struck a lamppost, plunging the top part of it into the crowd.

Nineteen ninety seven, not nineteen thirty seven. I'm kidding, fine, no, reading it as your heart desires. Two people were hospitalized with severe head injuries. The accident was a strange I should have let you get that one in there. And the.

Accident was a strange and grim counterpart to a sunny day of high festivity in which most of the two million spectators were far away from the accident and had no idea it happened. God the New York Times clowns, they cheered, clapped, and squealed as fourteen marching bands from thirteen states strutted, past or marched, as six hundred clowns and twelve hundred cheerleaders enthusiastically did their thing.

Paper record. You can't say a marching band, march it's please allow myself to introduce myself. Okay, crown jewel in the crown.

Surely you could say a clown gamboled or or a cheerleader. Yeah, I mean did their thing whatever most emphatically, as the immense six story balloons of instantly recognizable cartoon characters glided past the brick, glass, and concrete of Manhattan. Only at times the balloons were not gliding, but instead were careening as their handlers on the ground struggled to keep control in winds that reached as highs forty three miles an hour. For a while, the balloons seemed to be falling like flies. Barney suffered extensive damage and had to be he removed and fifty first Street. The Pink Panther succumbed at forty second Street, Quick Bunny and the Cat and the Hat limped away. At thirty sixth Street. There was high drama as the balloon handlers and the police tried to control the airborne chaos. As the Pink Panther lurched about while simultaneously imploding, a police inspector shouted, somebody, give me a knife quick. An officer quickly handed him a five inch long knife, and he punched a hole through the feline's tail, a move that almost immediately stabilized the balloon. Joyce Rice, who held one of the panthers ropes, said she was terrified the balloon was caught on top of me and my daughter. We thought it was going to smother us. Some of the Panthers' handlers said one of their colleagues was knocked at conscious during the collapse, but the police would not confirm the report. The worst problem occurred at seventy second Street and Central Park West, when the sixth story tall cat in the Hat struck a lamp post on the northeast corner, causing the horizontal metal arm to break off. Pat Clem, who videotaped the incident and gave the tape to the police, said the lampost was wabbled in the wind even before the balloon struck it. Eric Neulan from Katana, New York, said, the balloon struck the lamppost's arm twice. You thought it was going to bounce off, he said, but the second time it snapped, it was suspended for an instant, then it spiraled way down the prade just stopped. He continued, There was a prolonged silence. Your thoughts go from happy, joyous thanksgiving to prayers. John Morley of Manhattan said the falling arm missed him and his four year old daughter surette Ugh by about a foot. He said the Cat in the Hat was the second balloon to strike that particular lamppost. When he realized the arm was teetering, he started to push through the crowd with his daughter to escape.

It was coming.

That's the guy who shoved other women and children out of the way to get on a lifeboat in the Titanic. It was coming right at me, he said. Ronnie Taffett, a Maze spokeswoman, said a number of adjustments were made because of the weather the balloon. The balloons were inflated less to reduce their balloons were inflated less to reduce their buoyancy, and flown lower and at an angle to make them harder for the wind to catch. Additional handlers were also added. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said the city would look into how to prevent such accidents in the future. If this is something that can be corrected in the future, we'll correct it. We'll find out what happened. I don't think we know enough to answer that yet, he spoke after visiting the two more seriously injured victim at Saint Luke Roosevelt Hospital. Anytime there's an injury like this, it makes you feel very, very bad, mister Giuliani said. At the same time, the parade has long, long history. It's a beautiful parade. It accomplishes a great deal for young people and for the city. What a mass did you say that at the hospital bed tragedy, But at the same time, beautiful parade.

Before the parade, and that Missus Lincoln.

Before the parade began. The often driving wind was the main topic of discussion. You can never tell which way the wind demons are going to get you, said Manfred G. Bass, the chief designer of what he terms air sculptures that should have won them Apolitzar. I need to know everything about mantred G. Bass. Meanwhile, captains for each balloon lectured their crews. All stressed the need to be extra vigilant because of the wind. Some of their advice was technical, such as where to position one's arms while gripping the spool of cord. Some were playful, such as the admonition not to wave to television cameras with both hands, and some remarks were prophetic. What is it, Betty Davis said, fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride, a captain shouted over the crescendoing wind. The crash of Barney, the purple dinosaur, beloved by preschoolers and loathed by some parents, was heart stopping for those at the end of its ropes. Everything turned purple, said Antonella Laggiano of Mamaroneck, New York. That woman's racist Barney attacked us set a still stunned Isabella Fasciano of Hoboken, New Jersey, also a racist. After it fell, police officers rushed to puncture it with knives and relieved.

The danger is not this is I was wrong.

This is painting a beautiful, truly beautiful, viviage, vivid image.

That's why I wanted to read it all. The miypd's stabbing Barney to death on the ground while children watch.

The combination of cold and wind defined the parade for participants. The bare legs of the drilled team for the first band, Butler High School from butler pa were painfully pink, people in kangaroo costumes hopped about for warmth as much as dramatic effect, and the handlers holding onto the balloons, all of whom volunteered for the seemingly fun job, hung on for dear life. It's a lot more work than I thought it would be, said Brian Sherman, who clung tightly to a disturbingly frisky Peter Rabbit. Mister Sherman had volunteered at the urging of his girldfriend, who works in Macy's public relations department.

Woo, you talked to who?

And despite the winds and the problems they caused, the spectators got what they came for. Christina Benitez from Tucson, Arizonia pronounced it like the fucking guy doesn't what we do in the shadow, Tucson, Arizonia. Christina Benitez from Tucson, Arizona watched the parade with beaming pleasure at Broadway in thirty sixth Street. This is our culture, the American spirit of fun. I'm proud to be here. The tourists said, why you well, I tell you it's our culture. What a what a hideous collection of words? I was exposed to just now. I wish you'd let me all read it all in the newscaster voice. That would have been something. Oh continue.

Following the trag, the city put a policy in place that dictates that balloons can't fly if winds are stronger than twenty three miles an hour and wind gusts are higher than thirty four miles an hour. I don't know the difference between winds and wind gusts.

I think winds is the average, and then gusts as high as how I see it on like Aci Weather.

You know. Apparently one of these injured women who was hitting the head by the falling street lamp, Kathy Corona, was in a coma for almost a month. When she awoke, she still had a dent in her skull as wide as a tennis ball. After she recovered, she'd sued Macy's, who settled out of court in two thousand and one. But here's where it gets truly weird. In two thousand and six, Yankees picture Corey Little was flying as private four seater plane when he accidentally crashed into a condominium complex on East seventy second Street called the Belaire Apartments. The afore mentioned Kathy Corona, the coma woman lived in this building and the engine from the plane landed in her bedroom. Presumably she moved out of New York after this.

That is really one of those is there a God and does she hate me? Kind of things.

I don't think she was home all the time. But still, despite this policy about not flying balloons in high winds, there have been a few mishaps in recent years. The last major incident involving injury took place in two thousand and five when the Eminem's balloon hit a lamppost near Times Square, causing the light to fall and hit two women in the crowd. I believe they both were okay. And then in two thousand and eight, a Keith Herring balloon took a turn a little too wide and rammed the broadcast booth with Al Roker, Meredith Fierra, and Matt Eliora, temporarily taking them off the air. There's got to be a clip of that on YouTube. I should have looked that up.

It's so funny to me that Keith Herring became this like live laugh Love graded like America thing, like so recognizable because so many other of his drawings have like huge dicks in them. Yeah, like frequently right next to that dog that's everywhere, And people were like, no, we just want the we just want the baby with the rays coming out of it.

Thank you. He choose to engage with no other part of this man's legacy. I think the hospital down the street from where I live, Woodhall Hospital, has an original Keith Herring mural, because I think it was a I think at the time in the eighties it was on the i'd say the cutting edge of AIDS research, an age research. But it treated.

Yeah, he's a fascinating guy. I mean, he he It's it's funny too that people do would would get up in arms about him quote unquote selling out because he was a big sellout. He had like he was would sell his own stuff like prints and stuff out of like a pop up and soho. He was very much about like just making one and he wanted to make money, which good good on him.

But yeah, a lot of dicks. So that was two thousand and eight. Due to COVID nineteen, organizers switched to a TV only parade in twenty twenty, eliminating spectators from the route and requiring the dramatically scaled down group of handlers to wear masks during the abbreviated parade route outside the Macy's flagship store. So the parade endured, but the biggest disaster may be still to come. Apparently there was, or maybe still is, a macy Thanksgiving Day Parade movie in the works, the premise of which involves oversized balloons coming to life.

Yester, Yeah, yeah, I hope it's a horror.

I hope it's a hard R horror. I imagine it's a kid's movie. Yeah. I don't think it's like Stefpoff marshmallow Man style. I mean that would be cool. It wouldn't be anything.

If Macy's is actually signing off on it, it wouldn't be any uh anything vaguely edgy.

Yeah no. But for this year, twenty twenty three, I'm thankful that this cherished piece of monoculture remains relatively untainted. So we've reached the end of our discussion of Macy's Thanksaving Day Parade. Hoigel, how do you feel? Did I deliver?

You?

Did? You? Did?

You?

Did? I can? I can?

Yeah, I can wholeheartedly say. Between intrusive thoughts, Woman Pilot and the Woman, the Woman.

The sky fell on twice. This was a truly beautiful episode. Well, folks, I am truly thankful that we get to be here and be giant nerds together, me and my dear friend Alex Hoigel. I get to spend this time with you, Alex.

This is this is so nice, making truly foul jokes that will never see the light of air. Uh yeah, you know, I'd love to sometime, maybe even this Thanksgiving. Maybe we can just live stream it and share a piece of pumpkin pie before I get too drunk and start yelling at the football teams that I know nothing about who's playing?

How the Patriots doing? Jordan that bad that I know? Yeah?

Great, I love that all right. Well, thanks for listening, folks.

This has been Massachusetts. The show will deliver that will deliver that message in person this Thanksgiving for you. I'm Alex Igel and I'm Jordan runs Hog. We'll catch you next time. Happy Thanksgiving. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

The show's executives are Noel Brown and Jordan runtalg.

The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was.

Researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtogg and Alex Heigel.

With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

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